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Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org
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Sir, I feel great reluctance in calling the public attention to
the subject of this letter; but as I have no alternative, it is, at all events, some relief
to me to be able to do so through the medium of your generous columns.
I need not inform a man of letters, that the extracts which have been sent to The Morning Chronicle and
other papers, out of the work of mine just published, were not made by myself. If they had
been, they would not have subjected me to the conclusions which have been pretended by some,
and appear to have been really drawn by others, respecting the spirit of my intercourse with
I will put a case in illustration of my position with
This is a literal picture of the state of the case between
I had scarcely put up under the same roof with his Lordship (and the nature of
that occupation of a floor in his house is explained in my book, and was very different from
any thing like entertained by him as his guest) that our “host,” if he is so to be
called, commenced his claims upon our delicacy by writing disagreeable letters about us to his
friends. When I subsequently remonstrated with him on this subject, he answered me that it was
his way, and that he had “libelled his friends all around.” It is true I did not
know of these letters at the time; but his libels of his friends were very manifest: the
symptom was not encouraging; and the tempers he thought fit to try upon me in my poverty,
prepared further for what I had to expect. This was almost in the very first days of our
intercourse. I had hardly been under the roof with him at
Most calamitous was it on every account that at this early juncture of our
intercourse, my beloved friend, degrading
obligations of private friendship.
” God forbid I should be such a traitor to
those whose friendship elevated while it assisted me, and whom it is a transport to me,
whenever I think of it, to have been indebted to. I see beyond that. But I am bound to say that
I have not the less altered my practice in that particular; and not the less do I agree with
the eloquent after-saying of the same writer, that it is “comely, and sweet, and
exquisite,
” to be able to earn one’s own sufficiency. I only think,
especially in behalf of those who can enjoy leisure as well as business, that it should not be
made so hard a matter to do so, as it very often is, by the systems of society and by the
consequences they have in reserve for us, even before we are born, and in our very temperaments
as well as fortunes: and I think also that the world would have been losers, in a very large
way—far beyond what utilitarians suppose, and yet on their own ground—if certain
men of lively and improvident genius, humanists of the most persuasive order, had not sometimes
left themselves under the necessity of being assisted. The headlong sympathies that ran in
their blood, and that diverted them sometimes from ordinary duties, have helped to carry us all
forwards to those great waters of humanity which are now out over the
world, and which shall assuredly give it a new level and a new life.
But I did not sit down to this letter, Sir, to take up your time with theories. I
have written even more than was necessary for the real purpose of it, which was to
say—that nobody has a right to judge of the spirit of my intercourse
with Lord Byron from partial extracts out of the work in
question; and that i protest against any opinion of it whatsoever, unproduced by an
acquaintance with the work itself. I may put a case in the mean time, if I please, and
ask the reader what he thinks, on the face of it, of my claims on Lord Byron as a partner,
invited to set up a work with him under all the circumstances, and of my right to speak as
freely to the public of him, as he spoke secretly and underhand of me. But for a complete view
of the case I mus refer him (if he chuses to judge the matter) to the book itself, and to all
the evidences it contains, for me or against: for of one thing he may be certain—that
every jot of it is true. I love truth with a passion commensurate to what I think its
desirableness, above all other things, for the security of good to the world: and if I did not,
I should love it for the trouble it saves me in having but one story and one answer to all men,
and being a slave to nobody.
I have a word, however, to add, with regard to those who have hitherto thought fit to make objections to my book, without knowing the whole of it. Some of these, I have been told, are really conscientious men, who are kind enough to entertain an ill opinion of me with pain; and I can believe that partial extracts might possibly have led them into that opinion. All that I complain of in this case is, that they did not sufficiently think of their conscientiousness, when they expressed the opinion without knowing all I had to say. Some of them, I believe, have already become sensible of their mistake; and are waiting to do me justice. As to the other anonymous writers, who have attacked me in a different spirit, I concede even to them the possibility of their having come to a similar conclusion, out of the same partial degree of knowledge. I will at present not stop to inquire how far they were led into it by motives of their own. But I warn them how, upon a better acquaintance with the work, they renew the same kind of attacks; as, in that case, I shall be compelled to let the public see, not only the whole amount of what I have to object to them on my own part, but what their pretended hero thought and said of them on his. And this, if they insist upon it, it will only be less easy for me to do, that it is to spare them in the mean time. I will then answer both their verse and their prose, if they please; and the public shall see who has the worst of it. Though I have told nothing but the truth, I am far from having told all the truth—and I never will tell it all. Common humanity would not let me. But I will not have my very forbearance turned against me by those whose sufferings would be tragic to themselves only, and comic to all the rest of th world.
It has been said that I undervalue the genius of
After all, Sir, I had no intention in writing my book but to give a true
portrait of
I have only one opinion more to guard against, which might be caused by
something in my book itself; to wit, the face which the